i agree with the pirate. the affliction card is pretty sweet, and despite all the hype/waiting/bullshit watching Fedor face a top ranked UFC HW is wicked. I'm not the biggest Tim Sylvia fan, but he's a legitimate challenge. and the fact that you also get to see Barnett and Arlovski on this card make it the most kick ass night of HW fights i can think of ever.

i agree with the pirate. the affliction card is pretty sweet, and despite all the hype/waiting/bullshit watching Fedor face a top ranked UFC HW is wicked. I'm not the biggest Tim Sylvia fan, but he's a legitimate challenge. and the fact that you also get to see Barnett and Arlovski on this card make it the most kick ass night of HW fights i can think of ever.

Affliction managed to turn what was almost automatically a great card into a solidly mediocre one via stupid matchmaking.

Fedor/Sylvia is the only seriously interesting fight on the card, and Fedor vs almost any of the other heavies on the card would be a better and more intriguing match. Fedor/Sylvia is a good match because it's Fedor vs a ranked opponent for a change, but realistically Sylvia has no chance whatsoever on the ground, whereas Barnett, Rizzo, or Arlovski would stand a decent chance of at least surviving.

Aside from the main event, we have -

Barnett/Rizzo - a rematch nobody cares about. If Barnett wins it doesn't affect his ranking at all and doesn't put him any closer to a fight with Fedor (which realistically is the big Barnett fight out there everyone wants to see), and if he loses he just lost to a guy who's 2-2 with two KO losses in his last 4.

Arlovski/Rothwell - if I wanted to watch Arlovski crushing a C-class heavyweight, I'd watch every Arlovski victory in the UFC pre-Sylvia.

Babalu/Whitehead - having Babalu and Little Nog on the same card, not fighting each other, with Babalu fighting Mike Whitehead of all people and Little Nog fighting a middleweight that washed out of the UFC borders on criminally retarded matchmaking.

Most of the time when a show has poor matchups it's because sufficient talent is either unavailable or unaffordable; this is actually more frustrating because they have an incredibly stacked card of talent but they've wasted them all in matchups where one guy is a huge favorite so if they win, who cares, it doesn't move them up the ranks at all, and if there's a huge upset it fucks up future matchmaking.

consider that with the fighters they have, the card could look like this -

Every fight on there is an evenly matched one where there's no huge favorite, and all the winners would have a number of new matchups that would be made interesting by the results. Instead, we get a card full of the best heavyweights in the world, except almost none of them are fighting each other.